Author: Alexander Starostin

Microsoft has announced SharePoint 2016 version vision and strategy in April 2015. It became available for users with SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview edition in August 2015. To meet the exact up-to-date customers’ needs the SharePoint Server 2016 Beta 2, based on customers’ feedback, has been released in November 2015.
SharePoint Server 2016 introduces familiar and intuitive user experiences, cloud-inspired infrastructure with hybrid at the core and robust security and compliance for SharePoint Server 2016.
MS SharePoint Server 2016 Beta 2 provides new hybrid experiences that enable customers to take advantage of the possibilities of the cloud.

In SharePoint Server 2016 new hybrid features are available to enable hybrid solutions. Here are the most prominent ones:

– Hybrid Cloud Search. A new unified Search approach experience is now available in SharePoint Server 2016. With its help all of your crawled content gets indexed (including on-premises content) to your search index in Office 365. You would need to use the Office 365 Search to take advantages of this feature.

– Hybrid OneDrive for Business. Users can sync files with Office 365 and share them with others. They can also get access to their files through the Office 365 directly from any device.

– Sites you follow in one place. Users can now have the ability to follow SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online sites, and see them aggregated in a single list. - Data Loss Prevention. Intensified support for new Data Loss Prevention capabilities is included in SharePoint Server 2016 Beta 2.

– Increased File Size for uploads. The limit for maximum size of the uploaded file to SharePoint, set to 2Gb in previous versions, is no longer the issue. Though there’s no real limit now, Microsoft has strongly recommended for it not to go beyond 10Gb.

– Mobile experience. SharePoint Server 2016 comes with a touch friendly interface to allow you to make decisions faster and keep in contact with colleagues.

– Durable links. The idea is to make sure that links, you sent to your folks continues to work regardless of what happens to the document, i.e. the file name was changed or the document moved.

– Compliance tools. SharePoint Server 2016 provides a wide range of features and capabilities to ensure sensitive information to remains safe and that the appropriate people have access to the right information at the proper time.

The benefits of cloud are vast and significant. Cloud enables rapid deployment, provisioning, and scaling of IT resources and data. It also shortens development time, reduces waste, and lowers costs. But despite increasing cloud adoption rates, some companies still do not rush to move its workloads and applications to the cloud due to some common myths and delusions that are more fluff than fact. When organizations are considering moving to the cloud one of the first questions asked is, “Is it secure?” It’s a reasonable question, since there have been a lot of fears and doubts circulating across the industry around this point – particularly with some high profile breaches in 2014. While security is always a priority when it comes to business, several of these concerns are much more bark than bite. So, let’s demystify those concerns and give peace of mind for organizations looking to move forward with a transition to the cloud.

1. Cloud Environments Are Easier to Attack

Two identical servers have the same potential vulnerability risk level, no matter if they’re located in your company’s private data center or within a cloud provider’s data center. The data protection’s level relies less on the machines and more on the security state of each data center environment. At this point, many companies store their most valuable data in private clouds that they protect and maintain on their own. But if you are managing a few in-house IT resources of a small company, an external provider likely has more security expertise than you do.

So the clouds aren’t easier to attack, since the vulnerability depends on the security posture of the data center itself, which is provided by various security tools and methods.

2. Customers in the same cloud can attack each other.

Within a public cloud, multiple tenants share processing, storage, and other computing services within a cloud services provider’s data centers. It might make you imagine that it’s easy for one tenant to steal another tenant’s data due to the concept of shared resources. But in fact, virtualization provides strong partitions between tenants within the data center, so that they’re effectively isolated from each other. Unless your data center is owned by a competitor that would love to snitch your data, it’s very unlikely you’ll become an intended attack victim by a fellow customer.

3. You can’t control where your data resides in the cloud.

Data residency is a key concern, and many countries’ regulations do not allow exporting of personal data or its storage to another country. Knowing where your data resides requires transparency from your provider. You should also know where your data travels and how it is protected either at rest or over transition. This myth can be easily addressed by choosing a global cloud service provider, which provides secure cloud hosting solutions and operates data centers in multiple countries.

Putting your cloud fears aside will allow you to see the benefits of cloud solutions – such as lower costs, smarter resources usage, and expanded capacity. You just need to rely on a trustworthy cloud solutions provider, such as PlexHosted LLC, which delivers the security and data protection level, that will satisfy your requirements, and can provide you with fully managed secure private cloud or a separate tenant within the public cloud.

Sometimes our clients want to hide all signs of “MS Excel” on their BI reports, or just show the report on the full screen.

The reasons are different, but in most cases they don’t want end users to know, that reports were made in MS Excel application. After some research and practical attempts we’ve found that this is not possible, even using custom code. The good news are that there is a good built-in “workaround” inside a SharePoint, the bad news – this option is not showing on the site by default.

This “workaround” is RSDS (shared data source) connection file. Reports based on the RSDS connections provide all PowerPivot/BI capabilities, but without any signs of “MS Excel”. Today we’ll tell you how to enable the RSDS connections and use them to create reports.

By default the *.Rsds file content type does not appear as a new item dropdown in the Data Connection library. So our first step will be to configure the Data Connection library to include the Report Data Source Content type.
1. Navigate to the document library in which you are going to create your RSDS connection file and Power View report
2. Go to the Library tab and click on Library Settings.
3. Navigate to the Advanced Settings.
4. Choose Yes under Allow management of content types, and click OK.
5. Under the Content Types click on the Add from the existing site content types hyperlink.
6. Choose Report Data Source from the available site content types, click Add and then OK.

So, the first part is over. We’ve enabled the RSDS connections for the Data Connection library. Let’s proceed and create RSDS connection file.

1. Return to your document library, in the Files tab click New Document and choose Report Data Source.
2. Enter the name for your RSDS file and choose Microsoft BI Semantic Model for Power View from the Data Source Type menu.
3. In the Connection String field enter a pointer to the data source in the following format: (Data Source=http://yourdomain.com/Shared Documents/YourWorkbook.xlsx).
Optional: If you are using a workbook from the PowerPivot Gallery the pointer will be like: (Data Source=http://yourdomain.com/PowerPivot%20Gallery/YourWorkbook.xlsx).
4. In Credentials leave Windows authentication (integrated) or SharePoint user option selected and click on Test Connection. If connection created successfully, click OK.
5. Now you can see your shared data source (RSDS) connection file.

1. Return to your document library where RSDS connection file was created.
2. Click on the RSDS connection file to start creation of the Power View report.
3. Customize your report according to your goals.
4. Create your report and click on Save as in the File menu.
5. Now you are prompted to save report to the document library. Provide the name for your report and click Save.
6. Return to the document library and refresh the page. You can see your Power View report created using the shared data source (RSDS) connection file.

That is it. We’ve created a PowerView report with no signs of “MS Excel”, only your beautiful data
Hope this post will help you to improve your SharePoint skills.

PlexHosted Unveils New Cloud Offerings to Enhance Collaboration and Improve Productivity Across the Enterprise

Company’s managed hosting solutions make the cloud practical and affordable to businesses of all sizes; no more one-size-fits-all cloud at sky-high prices.

Jamestown, R.I. – March 10, 2015 – PlexHosted, a developer of robust managed cloud-hosting solutions for better enterprise collaboration, today unveiled enhanced cloud offerings solutions for business, ensuring the cloud is both practical and affordable to organizations of all sizes.Cloud migration can be daunting for small and mid-sized businesses, especially when faced with expensive service offerings from large vendors and filled with capabilities they don’t need. PlexHosted’s new hosting solutions provide the same quality of management as larger vendors, but at a much more attractive price.

PlexHosted’s new standalone farms start at $279 per month, which is 10% less than its nearest competitor. It’s two-tier farms (from $628), three-tier farms (from $877), and HA farms (from $1,799) also all show significant savings from average market prices. Those fees include 24/7 server(s) and services monitoring as part of the service – there are no additional set-up and hourly support fees as found at many other vendors. PlexHosted delivers cloud IaaS solutions and manages the farm all at one low monthly price.

In order to ensure optimal performance for businesses utilizing enterprise software platforms, PlexHosted has implemented Microsoft’s recommendations for the hardware used to support software like SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync. The result is a platform that performs better and works faster, ensuring customers are able to continue to achieve the business productivity they require.

Some of the technical improvements include faster RAM; a CPU core ratio now dedicated as 1vcpu = 1 physical core; increased HDD IO speed; and cloud machines that can now utilize a 1GB network for both public and private transfers. All of this allows for an almost immediate customer deployment and speedy hardware upgrades.
PlexHosted also utilizes geo-location in order to deploy servers both in the United States and globally, including Washington D.C., Houston, Dallas, San Jose, Seattle, Montreal, Toronto, Mexico, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Frankfurt.

PlexHosted is pleased to announce support for the connectivity of SharePoint hosted workbooks to open source MySQL database server. Now our customers are free to use MySQL as an external data source in their PowerPivot and PowerView reports with our multi-tenant SharePoint 2013 BI service.

PowerPivot data refresh in SharePoint 2013

PlexHosted PowerPivot solutions provide interactive and scheduled data refresh of PowerPivot workbooks from the latest information and data sources. The importance of receiving information in a timely fashion is obvious for business owners, isn`t it?

SharePoint 2013 Business Intelligence and MySQL database server

As always PlexHosted continues to improve the quality and scalability of its services as well as its expertise in the SharePoint Hosting industry. Previously, data refresh from MySQL was available only in dedicated SharePoint environments. Now you can easily connect a workbook to your MySQL database, upload it to your hosted SharePoint site, and have your business critical data always up to date.

Real-time Business Intelligence 2013, integration of data from various data sources, analyzing large amounts of information, effective sharing and collaborating with the most recent data, great data visualization, exceptional performance, and customer support available 24/7/365 are among the capabilities available with PlexHosted and its SharePoint 2013 BI services.

What’s new we can see in the improved Managed Metadata Service? SharePoint 2013.

Hello,
Today I want to talk about Managed Metadata service in SharePoint 2013. But first I want to clarify a couple of terms for you. As you probably know, metadata is information about information. And metadata management is the way to organize and maintain a company’s information for documents, records, etc. So, Managed Metadata is helping users easily structure and tag content, and provide end-users with the ability to search required information faster.

Managed Metadata service 2013

Since Managed Metadata has been introduced in SharePoint 2010, it has helped users to easily tag and structure content. Like most of its features, SharePoint 2013 has improved the basic Managed Metadata features.Managing metadata effectively requires careful thought and planning. Think about the kinds of information that you want to manage; the content of lists and libraries, and think about the way that the information is used in the organization. You can create sets of metadata terms for different kinds of information.

Managed Metadata in SharePoint 2013

Did you know that in SharePoint 2013 you can use the Managed Metadata service to improve your site navigation structure? You do not need to have any additional programming skills to produce auto-generated pages based on the taxonomy hierarchy. Instead of driving default URLs in a SharePoint 2013 site (like Library/forms/NewForm.aspx) you can easily read URLs from the Managed Metadata Term Store. As a result you will get an intuitive site with user-friendly and search engine-friendly URLs.

Managed Metadata key features

Some Managed Metadata features are very common; filtering list, views based hierarchy, search and SEO optimization. SharePoint 2013 features can deliver additional features like the following.

Better list view filtering. You can do improved filtering, displaying all the tagging with a value or a child of this value.

Better navigation. The Managed Metadata navigation feature allows you to navigate through libraries using hierarchies other than the folder hierarchy.

Better routing. Document routing can direct your content based on the metadata applied to it.

Better file searching. If you can’t remember exactly where your document is stored in a large library, you can use the taxonomy field to filter the open dialog display.

Better sociality. All social properties are sourced from the taxonomy system, so you do not need do additional social tagging.

What’s new in SharePoint Managed Metadata 2013?

There is a couple of main features which have been improved in SharePoint 2013 Managed Metadata service.

Pinned Terms. Terms can be reused in the Term Store, so you do not need create duplicates of terms.

Datasheet View. In SharePoint 2013, Managed Metadata columns support the Datasheet View, so you can use three additional options: replace all selected values with required terms, add terms to all selected fields, and remove terms from all selected fields.

There are the two most used features in the new SharePoint 2013 Managed Metadata service, but not all of them. You can check it all for yourself after purchasing a hosted SharePoint 2013 service from PlexHosted.

Start with the PlexHosted SharePoint hosting today and improve your business tomorrow!